A message from the Governing Board of the OpenChain Project:
We wanted to let you know that there will be a rotation in the administrative leadership of the OpenChain Project in Mid-December 2025. Shane Coughlan, our General Manager over the last eight years, will be transitioning to work on a personal venture, and we will shortly be announcing a new executive leader in the same role. In the meantime, the Governing Board, The Linux Foundation project management office, the Work Group Chairs and the Ambassadors will collaborate as usual to continue our normal meetings, releases and community building.
The Governing Board would like to express their gratitude to Shane for all the work he has put into the project over the years, constantly going above and beyond. Shane’s work with the OpenChain Project is nothing short of spectacular, he has been a community builder, role model, and friend to the OpenChain community and he will be missed. The board want to wish him the best of luck in his new endeavors and for him to know that he will forever remain part of the OpenChain family he helped create.
“I have been honored to work on this project, with this board and with everyone in our exceptional community over the last eight and a half years,” says Shane Coughlan, OpenChain General Manager. “After such a long period, and enjoying so much collective success, it is a difficult decision to move on to a new venture. However, there is a personal project that I want to attend to, and the passage of time has suggested to me that it is appropriate to begin work on that activity. I will speak more to this in early 2026, but for now my focus is on finalizing the transition of the administrative leadership of the OpenChain Project. We have extensive internal process material and a purposefully distributed management system to aide in sustainability and such transitions, and I am fully confident in the health and continued momentum of the project and our activities.
In closing, I want to take a moment to thank everyone who has made this journey possible for me. While there are too many people to name individually – such is the scale of our community and accomplishment – I would like to give special thanks to David Marr of Qualcomm for leading the foundation of the OpenChain Project, to Jimmy Ahlberg of Ericsson for leading us through the evolution into a multi-ISO standard project, to Watanabe San, Kobota San, Owada San and Fukuchi San for being instrumental in the development of our work in Japan, to Haksung Jang for leading our work in Korea to such success, to Zhenhua Sun in China for his leadership and driving frequent local meetings, to Oliver Fendt and Marcel Kurzmann in Germany for endlessly encouraging and supporting one of the exceptional local communities in the domain of processes and automation, and finally to the dearly departed Ueda San for providing inspiration in community building that has always helped guide and ensure the success of what we do.
And finally my thanks to you all, who have attended calls, come to meetings and read (and reshared) our news across the world. You made this community, and you made this success. I am grateful to call you my colleagues in open source.”
An administrative note: For those of you interested in learning more about this transition for 2026 – and about the executive leadership role – you can contact Renu from the Project Management office at helpdesk@lists.openchainproject.org
